Tampa
Celeste Price is a 26-year-old Florida middle-school teacher who married her police-officer husband for cover and took the eighth-grade English position to pursue 14-year-old boys. The book tracks her year of grooming Jack Patrick, the rival student she discards, the marriage that crumbles, and the trial that turns the case into national news. Nutting writes the entire book in Celeste's voice, refusing to step outside it for moral framing, asking whether the literary tradition that produced Lolita and American Psycho holds up when the predator is a woman.
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A 26-year-old Florida middle-school teacher narrates her predatory pursuit of a 14-year-old student in this surgical, polarizing transgressive debut.
Tampa is widely cited as one of the most controversial novels of the 2010s. The first-person predator narrator is unrelenting and explicit. Many readers either commit to the satirical purpose or set the book aside; the content is deliberately disturbing.
Tampa contains graphic depictions of an adult woman's sexual abuse of underage boys. The content is explicit and pervasive throughout. It is not recommended for readers sensitive to depictions of child sexual abuse.
Tampa was written by Alissa Nutting, published in 2013 by Ecco.
Tampa is 266 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Tampa takes most readers 4 to 6 hours to finish.
Tampa is a standalone novel by Alissa Nutting, not part of a series.
Tampa is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.